Some of the biggest countries are recording amazingly low figures. In India the virus has killed only two people per hundred thousand. In Brazil less than 4 per cent of those infected are dying. Nowhere is Covid-19 much worse than a bad outbreak of flu. That’s why I call the extreme policies of lockdowns and border closures the Self-Inflicted Disaster.

You may remember that I suggested months ago that the extraordinarily low infection rates and deaths in East Asia could be because people of Mongoloid race have strong genetic resistance to the virus. Till now nobody has wanted to say that could be so, because of fear of being accused of racism. However now I see that the New York Times, in an article about Thailand’s amazing success fighting Covid-19, suggests there could indeed be a genetic component in the immune systems of Thais and other peoples of the Mekong River region. Thailand has experienced only 58 deaths from the virus; Vietnam none at all; China’s southwestern province of Yunnan fewer than 190 cases.

Eoin Treacy's view

There is an alternative interpretation to of the fact that cases in Yunnan, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam has been so low. What if these populations already had herd immunity because they have been exposed to similar diseases in the past?

SARS was eventually traced to a cave in Yunnan. The whole purpose of the labs set up to study coronaviruses in Wuhan and elsewhere was to learn more about them. China’s so-called “bat woman” searched caves all over China for coronavirus mutations so they could be studied and better understood. The risk of warehousing these highly infectious diseases, and the difficulty in avoiding the potential for a virus escaping the lab setting, appears to have been grossly under appreciated. 

The destruction and sanitation of the Wuhan wet market and obfuscation of discussions about the origin of the virus is only helping to fuel speculation about the Communist Party’s intentions. For example, was it an intentional act? In the grizzly calculus of global domination was the determination made that China would come out ahead, particularly during a US Presidential election year? The shipping of tens of thousands of fully functional fake driver’s licences to the USA is also an additional emerging story that needs to be monitored.  If it is this easy to fake a driver’s licence magnetic strip a mail-in ballot should be no problem.

One risk investors do not yet appear ready to price in is, there will be no result from the November Presidential election. 34 states have laws that a mail-in ballot must be received by election day. Right now, the US postal service is creaking at the seams. They are in no way equipped to deal with the flood of additional work required to conduct a mail-in election.